Building robust and general reasoning ability is a central goal in the development of large language models (LLMs). Recent efforts increasingly turn to code as a rich training source, given its inherent logical structure and diverse reasoning paradigms--such as divide-and-conquer, topological ordering, and enumeration. However, reasoning in code is often expressed implicitly and entangled with syntactic or implementation noise, making direct training on raw code suboptimal. To address this, we introduce TraceMind, a large-scale corpus of 2.6 million samples that transforms code execution into explicit, step-by-step chain-of-thought style rationales, which we call Chain of Execution (CoE). The corpus spans domains including mathematics, classical algorithms and algorithmic competition, and is enriched with variable-tracing questions and code rewritings to enhance logical granularity and code diversity. We evaluate Tracepile using three training setups--continue-pretraining, instruction tuning after pretraining, and two-stage finetuning. Experiments across four base models (LLaMA 3, LLaMA 3.1, Qwen-2.5, and Qwen-2.5 Coder) and 20 benchmarks covering math, code, logic, and algorithms demonstrate consistent improvements. Notably, Tracepile boosts LLaMA3-8B by 9.2\% on average across nine math datasets and delivers clear gains on LiveCodeBench, CRUX, and Zebra Logic under two-stage finetuning.

Significant progress has been achieved using Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision. However, challenges persist in modeling multi-scale spatial relationships, hindering effective integration of fine-grained local details and longrange global dependencies. To address this limitation, a Multi-Kernel CorrelationAttention Vision Transformer (MK-CAViT) grounded in the Hirschfeld-GebeleinRényi (HGR) theory was proposed, introducing three key innovations. A parallel multi-kernel architecture was utilized to extract multi-scale features through small, medium, and large kernels, overcoming the single-scale constraints of conventional ViTs. The cross-scale interactions were enhanced through the Fast-HGR attention mechanism, which models nonlinear dependencies and applies adaptive scaling to weigh connections and refine contextual reasoning. Additionally, a stable multi-scale fusion strategy was adopted, integrating dynamic normalization and staged learning to mitigate gradient variance, progressively fusing local and global contexts, and improving training stability.

Modern language-model deployments must often balance competing objectives--for example, helpfulness versus harmlessness, cost versus accuracy, and reward versus safety. We introduce Conformal Arbitrage, a post-hoc framework that learns a data-driven threshold to mediate between a Primary model optimized for a primary objective and a more conservative Guardian--which could be another model or a human domain expert--aligned with a guardrail objective. The threshold is calibrated with conformal risk control, yielding finite-sample, distribution-free guarantees that the long-run frequency of undesirable events (such as factual errors or safety violations) does not exceed a user-specified quota. Because Conformal Arbitrage operates wholly at the API level--without requiring access to model logits or updating model weights--it complements weight-based alignment techniques and integrates seamlessly with existing cost-aware cascades. Empirically, Conformal Arbitrage traces an efficient frontier, allowing users to define an acceptable performance level for one objective while maximizing utility in another. We observe that our method outperforms (in terms of accuracy on multiple-choice style questions) cost-matched random routing between models. These properties make Conformal Arbitrage a practical, theoretically grounded tool for trustworthy and economical deployment of large language models across a broad range of potentially competing objectives.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various domains but typically rely on centralized, static graphs, which limits their applicability in distributed, evolving environments. To address this limitation, we define the task of Federated Continual Graph Learning (FCGL), a paradigm for incremental learning on dynamic graphs distributed across decentralized clients. Existing methods, however, neither preserve graph topology during task transitions nor mitigate parameter conflicts in server-side aggregation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MOTION, a generalizable FCGL framework that integrates two complementary modules: the Graph Topology-preserving Multi-Sculpt Coarsening (G-TMSC) module, which maintains the structural integrity of past graphs through a multi-expert, similarity-guided fusion process, and the Graph-Aware Evolving Parameter Adaptive Engine (G-EPAE) module, which refines global model updates by leveraging a topology-sensitive compatibility matrix. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach improves average accuracy (AA) by an average of 30% over the FedAvg baseline across five datasets while maintaining a negative average forgetting (AF) rate, significantly enhancing generalization and robustness under FCGL settings.

At the core of the Transformer, the softmax normalizes the attention matrix to be right stochastic. Previous research has shown that this often de-stabilizes training and that enforcing the attention matrix to be doubly stochastic (through Sinkhorn's algorithm) consistently improves performance across different tasks, domains and Transformer flavors. However, Sinkhorn's algorithm is iterative, approximative, non-parametric and thus inflexible w.r.t. the obtained doubly stochastic matrix (DSM). Recently, it has been proven that DSMs can be obtained with a parametric quantum circuit, yielding a novel quantum inductive bias for DSMs with no known classical analogue. Motivated by this, we demonstrate the feasibility of a hybrid classical-quantum doubly stochastic Transformer (QDSFormer) that replaces the softmax in the self-attention layer with a variational quantum circuit. We study the expressive power of the circuit and find that it yields more diverse DSMs that better preserve information than classical operators. Across multiple small-scale object recognition tasks, we find that our QDSFormer consistently surpasses both a standard ViT and other doubly stochastic Transformers. Beyond the Sinkformer, this comparison includes a novel quantum-inspired doubly stochastic Transformer (based on QR decomposition) that can be of independent interest. Our QDSFormer also shows improved training stability and lower performance variation suggesting that it may mitigate the notoriously unstable training of ViTs on small-scale data.

Image deblurring plays a crucial role in enhancing visual clarity across various applications. Although most deep learning approaches primarily focus on sRGB images, which inherently lose critical information during the image signal processing pipeline, RAW images, being unprocessed and linear, possess superior restoration potential but remain underexplored. Deblurring RAW images presents unique challenges, particularly in handling frequency-dependent blur while maintaining computational efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Frequency Enhanced Network (FrENet), a framework specifically designed for RAW-to-RAW deblurring that operates directly in the frequency domain. We introduce a novel Adaptive Frequency Positional Modulation module, which dynamically adjusts frequency components according to their spectral positions, thereby enabling precise control over the deblurring process. Additionally, frequency domain skip connections are adopted to further preserve high-frequency details. Experimental results demonstrate that FrENet surpasses state-of-the-art deblurring methods in RAW image deblurring, achieving significantly better restoration quality while maintaining high efficiency in terms of reduced MACs. Furthermore, FrENet's adaptability enables it to be extended to sRGB images, where it delivers comparable or superior performance compared to methods specifically designed for sRGB data. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/WenlongJiao/FrENet.

In order to train, test, and evaluate nudity detection models, machine learning researchers typically rely on nude images scraped from the Internet. Our research finds that this content is collected and, in some cases, subsequently distributed by researchers without consent, leading to potential misuse and exacerbating harm against the subjects depicted. This position paper argues that the distribution of nonconsensually collected nude images by researchers perpetuates imagebased sexual abuse and that the machine learning community should stop the nonconsensual use of nude images in research. To characterize the scope and nature of this problem, we conducted a systematic review of papers published in computing venues that collect and use nude images. Our results paint a grim reality: norms around the usage of nude images are sparse, leading to a litany of problematic practices like distributing and publishing nude images with uncensored faces, and intentionally collecting and sharing abusive content. We conclude with a call-to-action for publishing venues and a vision for research in nudity detection that balances user agency with concrete research objectives.

Discrete diffusion models (DDMs) have shown powerful generation ability for discrete data modalities like text and molecules. However, their practical application is hindered by inefficient sampling, requiring a large number of sampling steps. Accelerating DDMs by using larger step sizes typically introduces significant problems in generation quality, as it amplifies the impact of both the compounding decoding error due to factorized predictions and discretization error from numerical approximations, leading to a significant decrease in sampling quality. To address these challenges, we propose learnable sampler distillation (LSD), a novel approach to train fast and high-fidelity samplers for DDMs. LSD employs a distillation approach where a student sampler with a few steps learns to align its intermediate score trajectory with that of a high-quality teacher sampler with numerous steps. This alignment is achieved by optimizing learnable sampler coefficients that adaptively adjust sampling dynamics. Additionally, we further propose LSD+, which also learns time schedules that allocate steps non-uniformly. Experiments across text generation, image generation, and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform existing samplers for DDMs, achieving substantially higher sampling quality with significantly fewer sampling steps. Our code is available at https://github.com/feiyangfu/LSD.

In Bayesian persuasion, an informed sender strategically discloses information to a receiver so as to persuade them to undertake desirable actions. Recently, Markov persuasion processes (MPPs) have been introduced to capture sequential scenarios where a sender faces a stream of myopic receivers in a Markovian environment. The MPPs studied so far in the literature suffer from issues that prevent them from being fully operational in practice, e.g., they assume that the sender knows receivers' rewards. We fix such issues by addressing MPPs where the sender has no knowledge about the environment.

Assessing the safety of autonomous driving (AD) systems against security threats, particularly backdoor attacks, is a stepping stone for real-world deployment. However, existing works mainly focus on pixel-level triggers that are impractical to deploy in the real world. We address this gap by introducing a novel backdoor attack against the end-to-end AD systems that leverage one or more other vehicles' trajectories as triggers. To generate precise trigger trajectories, we first use temporal logic (TL) specifications to define the behaviors of attacker vehicles. Configurable behavior models are then used to generate these trajectories, which are quantitatively evaluated and iteratively refined based on the TL specifications. We further develop a negative training strategy by incorporating patch trajectories that are similar to triggers but are designated not to activate the backdoor. It enhances the stealthiness of the attack and refines the system's responses to trigger scenarios. Through extensive experiments on 5 offline reinforcement learning (RL) driving agents with 6 trigger patterns and target actions combinations, we demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our proposed attack, showing the under-exploration of existing end-to-end AD systems' vulnerabilities to such trajectory-based backdoor attacks. Videos of our attack are available at: tlbackdoor.